Cunningham was in worse shape: He was hit in the pelvic area and bleeding profusely. Although still lucid, he was in considerable pain.
There appeared to be no question that the enemy was targeting the casualties, but because the enemy was firing uphill, from well below the downed helicopter, the rounds were coming all the way to the top of the hill, past the helicopter. An RPG whizzed up past Self ’s head and blew up, and bullets were smacking into trees and rocks. Everyone was kept down by this effective grazing fire.
The counterattack had been expected, since the Rangers could see the enemy maneuvering toward positions where they might have clear shots at the twenty-seven Americans still alive. What was most important, however, was that when Razor 1 was shot down, the enemy was firing from positions as close as ten meters from the helicopter. Now, through effective use of the limited firepower they had, plus close air support that had forced the Al Qaeda soldiers back, they were an estimated four hundred meters away and having difficulty getting closer.
Intelligence sources able to monitor Al Qaeda radio transmissions clearly heard commanders issuing instructions on how their soldiers should maneuver to get closer, specifically warning them not to bunch up into large targets, staying in groups of four or five and trying to attack from several different locations simultaneously, or in sequence. At one point, American intel picked up one of the enemy requesting that a video camera be brought to their position so the battle could be recorded.
What the Rangers were able to observe were Al Qaeda forces moving on a small ridgeline that paralleled the one they were on, at a lower elevation and to their rear. The enemy forces were clover-leafing—they’d come up, crest the ridgeline, and four or five individuals would fire RPGs and a machine gun at them. Then they’d go back down the slope, where they were protected from return fire, traverse the slope, and come up in another location and fire on the hilltop again.
The most effective means of interdicting that technique was to drop bombs on the side of the slope the enemy was attempting to exploit. As before, whenever planes flew into the area close enough to be heard, the enemy stayed down and stopped firing. Realizing this, Vance and Brown kept cycling bombers through the area, ultimately, with the help of combat controllers Hotaling and Fleener, dropping thousand-pounders from B-52 and B-1 bombers.
The bullets that found their way beneath the ceramic plates in Jason Cunningham’s protective vest had done maximum damage. The entry wounds were on the side of his lower back. One, it was reported later, fractured his pelvis, while another pierced the iliac artery, the vessel that carries oxygenated blood from the abdominal aorta to the legs and feet. The two medical personnel who were unhurt, PJ Keary Miller and the Ranger medic who had climbed the mountain with the recently arrived reinforcements, immediately knew that Cunningham’s wounds were life-threatening, and that short of getting him to the nearest surgical hospital, there was little they could do but try to keep him as comfortable and as warm as possible.
In the preceding hours, Jason had worked with Cory to move the wounded from the inside of the helicopter to one collection point, then to another, putting the welfare of his patients ahead of his own. Even after he was hit and unable to move about because of the pelvic injury, the uninjured medics say Cunningham made sure that he passed on to them whatever information he had that could aid them in treating his patients.
There was a certain sad irony that Cunningham had been one of the PJs who lobbied military medical authorities after the minefield jump mission to allow the pararescuemen to carry units of red blood cells into the field, the better to treat patients who’d lost considerable blood, because now one of the blood packs was being given to him, and the other went to the other wounded medic.
It was readily apparent to Captain Self that several of the casualties might not survive if evacuation was delayed another seven or eight hours, until after dark. In his affidavit, radio operator Vance says, “Controller asked me if the pickup zone was cold and how many guys we were going to lose if we waited to be exfiltrated [until after nightfall]. I asked the medic, ‘If we hang out here, how many guys are going to die?’ The medic said at least two, maybe three. I reported to Controller, ‘It is a cold PZ and we are going to lose three if we wait.’ Just as I said it was a cold PZ, we were shot at.”
The three that the Ranger medic thought might die were Cunningham, Cory, and Greg Calvert, the pilot whose hand had nearly been shot off seconds after the crash-landing.
After the battle they’d been through just to stay alive, the occasional rifle shots that Al Qaeda forces fired at them were of little concern and no consequence. So long as the enemy didn’t get reinforcements, or bring in a skilled sniper, Self ’s concern was more about convincing his headquarters that it would be safe to come in during daylight hours and evacuate at least the wounded, than it was about being overrun by the enemy.
Once Self no longer needed Vance as a rifleman, the two radio operators had worked out a relationship between themselves and the captain that seemed to be effective. Vance stayed in contact with observation posts in the area, and when word came that Al Qaeda forces were moving in their general direction, he’d have Brown direct close air support to suppress the potential threat. At least that’s the way it’s described in the Vance affidavit.
After the Vance affidavit was leaked, sources in the combat controller community claimed that the threat from enemy forces in the area was greater than Vance realized. What makes it difficult to sort out the truth is that there is a long-standing tension—some would say animosity—between the CCT community and the TACPs. And those who have asked why Captain Self ’s request to bring in a medevac helicopter was ignored—among them Jason Cunningham’s parents—have never been given the satisfaction of a detailed answer. When told that the parents wanted to know, AFSOC’s public affairs officer, Maj. Karen Finn, said, “I hope you’re not going to be the one to tell them.” She then went on to insist that Captain Self and TACP Vance were wrong in claiming that the LZ could be made “cold” for a safe extraction of the critically wounded. Her claim was that they “didn’t have the big picture.”
Military sources with whom Finn’s claim was discussed say, in no uncertain terms, that her statement is “an insult to the integrity of a highly qualified Ranger officer whose actions on Takur Ghar earned him a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, and an invitation from the President to attend the State of the Union address.”
The fact is that Finn wasn’t there. Her comments, and her pushing the credibility-challenged DoD “Executive Summary on the Battle of Takur Ghar,” smack of the worst sort of flackery. The notion that Finn’s assertions should be accepted and the standing of two people who were in the thick of the battle written off is offensive.
If she wanted to press her case on behalf of SOCOM and AFSOC, she needed to make available for interviews the combat controllers who were in and around Takur Ghar mountain during Operation Anaconda, among them Jim Hotaling and Jessie Fleener. That Finn would be biased in favor of what she implied was the combat controllers’ point of view on the decision not to bring in an evac helicopter during daylight isn’t surprising. AFSOC “owns” the combat controllers, and one would expect her to take their side in a dispute with an Army Ranger officer and an Air Force TACP attached to the Ranger unit.
Fleener was contacted shortly after he was graduated from Officer Training School and preparing to move on to training as a combat rescue officer, and he was willing to discuss Operation Anaconda if Finn granted permission. Jim Hotaling had been on a cross-country tour during which he gave several unclassified speeches that included details of his role in Operation Anaconda. Both were easily reachable by phone. In theory, both were in position during the battle to have a different, if not bigger picture of what was happening nearby while Jason Cunningham lay bleeding out. Yet neither was made available for interviews for this book by Finn.
Finn’s assertions aside, Captain Self did, indeed, have other eye
s watching the potential enemy threat in the area. Nearby Aussie SAS patrols were looking out for attempts by Al Qaeda to move on Self ’s platoon. Several SEAL observation posts were in contact with the Rangers. And while the action was taking place, even Hotaling, who had been atop a ridge about two miles south of Takur Ghar for more than a week, said that despite intel reports that some seventy enemy soldiers were heading toward the downed Americans, he never saw anything more than small groups of men trying to get into the area. When he saw them, he bombed them. None got closer than three-quarters of a mile to Self ’s platoon. TACP Vance confirmed that the reported seventy enemy soldiers never appeared.
Headquarters had also relayed to Self intel that they were picking up on intercepts of enemy radio transmissions that seemed to indicate an attempt on the part of the Taliban or Al Qaeda to marshal a force of 250 fighters for yet another counterattack. But as with the reports of a force of seventy moving into the area, the 250 never materialized.
It wasn’t difficult for the men on the hill to surmise what was going on at headquarters. They were thinking, “We’ve already had three helicopters shot up in the same location. It’s a bad location. Even though the captain thinks it’s cold, he may not have complete situational awareness. And the consequences of bringing another helicopter in there—if it doesn’t make it out—is that the helo’s crew is now added to the twenty-seven men who need to be pulled off the mountain. Even more, the small LZ would now be cluttered with the wreckage of two helicopters and useless, and those guys are going to have to hike hundreds of meters to find another suitable pickup zone.”
Nevertheless, Captain Self believed that with the availability of close air support, as they’d been using it all morning and into the afternoon, the landing zone they were on was safe for an evac mission to get in and get out, and ordered Vance to continue pressing the point with the controllers at headquarters. The official radio logs indicate that the Rangers had made “adamant” calls for medevac with the suggestion that a bird could get in to take out the three critical cases, meaning the helicopter would be on the ground for no more than two minutes.
At one point the Ranger medic himself was put on the radio to convey the specific nature of the casualties, followed by “Six Actual,” the platoon leader who reiterated that if they didn’t send in the helicopter, they were going to lose two or three more men. The response was as cold as the temperature on the top of the ten-thousand-foot-high mountain: “We understand the nature of your casualties, and the consequences of not sending a medevac.”
Up at K-2, while waiting for a plane to Bagram, Chris Young was listening to the SATCOM channel when he heard Anaconda headquarters radio back to the Ranger team that “there would be no attempt to pick them up until nightfall.”
Military experts who have examined the situation the Rangers were in say that what the brass in Bagram didn’t seem to understand was that the tactical situation on the ground had dramatically changed since Razor 1 was shot down. At the point Self was getting insistent about bringing in a helicopter to evac the critical casualties in daylight, all the enemy fighters who did the shooting from close in were dead. The problem was that the platoon leader hadn’t been able to make it clear on the radio that they were no longer dealing with enemy shooters ten to thirty meters away; the enemy was three hundred to more than a thousand meters out. Would it be a gamble to bring a helicopter in? Yes, but it also had been a gamble to bring in the CSAR birds under fire on the nights the 10th Mountain Division needed help extracting the wounded. Long after the mission had ended, in after-action reports and the inevitable “lessons learned” documents, it’s mentioned that headquarters may have chosen to ignore Self ’s declaration that the LZ was cold because, simultaneous with those radio calls, the platoon was asking for bomb drops on nearby ridges and valleys. What the leadership watching their live Predator feeds in the comfort of a warm building at Bagram couldn’t seem to understand was that the bomb drops were preventive in nature, not evidence that the platoon was under enemy attack.
Everyone on the hill was aware that Cunningham would not survive if they did not get him out of there before dark. The Ranger medic who was caring for him declared his condition to be “urgent surgical.” He knew there was nothing he could do to stop the internal bleeding, and he knew that of all the people on the mountain that day, Jason Cunningham was one who clearly understood that fact.
Vance continued to maintain his position that the landing zone could have been kept cold enough to permit an evac helicopter to come in. And Self had doped out the situation and determined that a Chinook could be directed to land on the reverse slope, away from where the enemy had launched their counterattack, completely concealing the body of the aircraft, with only its rotors visible from the enemy-held ridgeline four hundred meters away.
None of the men trapped on the mountain knew that less than fifteen minutes’ flying time away, a pair of Air Force HH-60G Pave Hawks were waiting at the Texaco FARP for orders to go in and get the casualties out. Had they known, they could have told Bagram that considering the significantly smaller size of the 60, one could land and be totally hidden behind the ridge—not even the rotors would be visible to the Al Qaeda forces.
They could have even provided instructions for the route the CSAR birds should fly in order to make the pickup. Vance detailed it in his affidavit. “I gave Controller the approach heading, the land heading, and the departure heading. There was a zero-nine-zero approach heading, a two-thirty-five land heading, and a two-seventy departure heading.” This wasn’t guesswork; it wasn’t a question of whether wishing would make it so.
What is left to guess is whether the special-ops commanders, including Brigadier General Trebon, himself an Air Force general, knew that the CSAR birds were ready, willing, and able to attempt the rescue. In a phone call to Brig. Gen. John H. Folkerts, the CG of the 347th Rescue Wing at Moody Air Force Base, to tell him that one of his men had been hit, Trebon indicated that the area had been too hot to bring in a medevac helicopter during daylight hours. Folkerts says Trebon never mentioned the availability of Air Force HH-60G CSAR birds with Folkert’s own PJs aboard that had been sitting just fifteen minutes away at Texaco FARP.
At one point earlier in the day, Trebon apparently had more grandiose plans for a rescue mission. That was what all the activity that PJ Caleb Ethridge had observed at Texaco was about.
Ethridge says the SEALs took charge of the situation, spread out a map of the area, and started coordinating what everyone would do. At about noon, the special-ops leaders came over to check out the Pave Hawks in order to determine how many people they could carry. “We were going to go in with these three Chinooks full of bad guys, and our two helicopters, and then two Apaches, so it was going to be a seven-ship that was going to go in.
“It was like Apocalypse Now, ‘Flight of the Valkyries,’ that was playing in my head when we were getting ready to go,” says Ethridge, who then hums the unforgettable melody, “Da-da-da-da-DUN-DUN . . .” and was thinking, “this is going to be way worse than a couple nights ago. This is going to be daytime. This is not good.”
The PJs had heard through the grapevine that a PJ had been shot, but dismissed it, assuming that the wound was minimal. Ethridge says, “We knew there were a couple of the guys who were killed right off the bat; we found out they were killed instantly, and we’re just, like, ‘Dang, something’s going on bad.’ ”
Ethridge surmises that the special-ops force that came in to Texaco had been given the leeway to plan a rescue mission and then execute it. He describes it as, “You guys get yourself squared away and make a plan and go.”
Finally the order was given to launch the rescue mission. The seven helicopters spooled up and took off, but they didn’t get very far. “We just took off,” says Ethridge, “and then we all turned around. The command in Bagram said, ‘No, no one’s sending anybody else.’ They weren’t going to send anybody in till it got dark again. Or until fighting ceased. So we kep
t getting ready to go, but then we wouldn’t.”
Ethridge was conflicted. When he got word that a PJ had been shot, the potential mission suddenly became personal. “We’re going to go get our own guys; they’re a little closer to us than regular Army. It was, just, Wow! Our own guys are getting shot up. But we really didn’t know what was going on. We weren’t going to second-guess our leadership. They’re saying ‘It’s too hot,’ and we’re thinking, ‘Well, we went in last night and it wasn’t that hot. I mean, we weren’t getting shot at that bad, y’know?’ ”
What was disturbing to some of the men who were able to monitor SATCOM was that it appeared that the Rangers trapped on Takur Ghar mountain were being conned into believing that a rescue mission—at least one to evacuate the critical casualties—was still being planned, when they knew that the 160th Chinook pilots at Texaco FARP, who had been on duty for more than twenty hours, were told to get some sleep, that no one was flying in until after dark.
One of the difficulties of being in the military is that it’s very difficult to question the decisions of those who outrank you. And when an officer reaches that magical point in his career where someone pins a star on his collar, it’s even more difficult for those not similarly exalted to question an order. So no one in uniform is going to publicly question Brigadier General Trebon’s decision on March 4, 2002, while pararescueman Jason Cunningham was bleeding out on top of a mountain in Afghanistan. And Trebon himself has apparently decided it’s beneath him to respond to questions from civilian journalists on the matter. He’s got his career to think about.
What would be the consequences to the career of an officer who, knowing that three helicopters had been shot up in a specific area earlier in the day, sent in a rescue helicopter, and it got shot down?
A forthright answer came from a career military officer whose decision to remain anonymous makes a lot of sense, given the system. “It’s always easier to be safe. It’s safer to be safe. Maybe that’s what happened.”
None Braver Page 36